- PayPal is diving deeper into blockchains.
- Wall Street is following suit.
- Here's what to expect from TradFi's embrace of crypto in 2026.
A version of this article appeared in our The Roundup newsletter on December 26. Sign up here.
Happy Holidays. Eric here.
PayPal is all in on stablecoins.
The $56 billion payment giant’s CEO, Alex Chriss, told Fortune this week that it is integrating blockchain solutions across its verticals.
Why? Because the 30-year-old venture must reinvent itself to stay relevant in an ever-changing world.
“If you were to build the payments ecosystem from scratch today, it wouldn’t look like the way it does today,” said Chriss. “You would start to use some sort of blockchain, or some sort of thing that probably looks a lot like stablecoin.”
PayPal is hardly alone. Wall Street players aplenty are on a campaign to integrate blockchain solutions into their offerings.
Tech titans like Stripe and Google are launching their own blockchains, banks such as Santander and Société Générale are reportedly exploring the creation of their own stablecoins, and crypto firms and institutional players are scooping up blockchain businesses in multi-million-dollar acquisitions.
As Mike Giampapa, general partner at Galaxy Ventures, told me, institutions “view these efforts as opportunities for growth and margin expansion, replacing legacy rails with modern blockchain infrastructure without requiring end users to materially change existing behaviour.”
These efforts are expected to continue next year, too.
If 2025 was the year when regulators and lawmakers cleared the path for traditional financial firms to adopt crypto rails, 2026 is set to be the year when they take advantage of that opportunity.
And rest assured that DL News will be there to report on it.
Brazilian $195,000 music project will let audiences ‘hear’ Bitcoin price changes
Brazil’s culture ministry has given its blessing to an art project that aims to turn Bitcoin price volatility into impromptu musical masterpieces, Tim Alper reports.
How crypto airdrops will change in 2026
The days of experimenting with new protocols and receiving lumps of valuable tokens are fading away, Tim Craig writes.
Why South Korea and Japan are bidding to make 2026 the year of the stablecoin
South Korea and Japan are playing catch-up in the stablecoins game in the face of a US-dominated global stablecoin market worth around $255 billion.
Post of the Week
You haven’t missed the State of Defi report, created in collaboration with DL News and our friends over at DefiLlama and DL Research, have you?
The State of DeFi report is here.
— DL Research (@dl_research) December 17, 2025
In collaboration with @defillama and @dlnews, this report provides a comprehensive, data-led read on DeFi in 2025 and the forces shaping its next chapter.
A cross-vertical perspective from the Llamacorp ecosystem.https://t.co/NuzaEf8OAL pic.twitter.com/u3Lie2QFjT
